Apologies if this has been discussed before. My search wasn't very enlightening but if you could point to a previous post that would be great.

I'm curious about how exactly they determine the "less than a minute" mark. The show is not televised as it happened in real time. There are edits for flubs, judge discussions, to remove excessive dead time, etc. I assume that no editing happens "on the fly" and that everything is cut after the game has concluded. So at the time of the LTAM warning, they at best have a rough idea of how much actual, televisable footage they have. Is there some sort of timer that they use, stopping and restarting whenever there is a pause in the action? Or am I taking the LTAM too literally and should instead think of it as a "Hey, better get a move on..." prompt? And out of further curiosity, has anyone ever timed the LTAM durations over a period of time to see how close to 60 seconds they actually are?

The show is not televised as it happened in real time. There are edits for flubs, judge discussions, to remove excessive dead time, etc. I assume that no editing happens "on the fly" and that everything is cut after the game has concluded. So at the time of the LTAM warning, they at best have a rough idea of how much actual, televisable footage they have. Is there some sort of timer that they use, stopping and restarting whenever there is a pause in the action? Or am I taking the LTAM too literally and should instead think of it as a "Hey, better get a move on..." prompt?

As much as possible, they do try to show things in real time. Any judge discussions take place during the "commercial break" gap. Players are told to keep things moving along, and, should a dispute arise, wait until the end of the round to bring it up. I remember asking what to do if an unexpected f-bomb or similar were to fall from our lips, and they said just keep going. They'd fix it later. (This was close on the heels of Austin Rogers' tapings, so the subject was fresh in their minds!)

Certainly, someone's keeping track of time and giving Alex the high sign to say "LTAM" at the soonest opportunity. They're not being so precise as to have him say, "You have forty-five seconds left," or something, but they're just giving the players a chance to hit the clues they may have been eyeing but never got around to.

The show is not televised as it happened in real time. There are edits for flubs, judge discussions, to remove excessive dead time, etc. I assume that no editing happens "on the fly" and that everything is cut after the game has concluded. So at the time of the LTAM warning, they at best have a rough idea of how much actual, televisable footage they have. Is there some sort of timer that they use, stopping and restarting whenever there is a pause in the action? Or am I taking the LTAM too literally and should instead think of it as a "Hey, better get a move on..." prompt?

As much as possible, they do try to show things in real time. Any judge discussions take place during the "commercial break" gap. Players are told to keep things moving along, and, should a dispute arise, wait until the end of the round to bring it up.

I agree with squarekara. They try as much as possible to play the game in real time. Yes, there are going to be rare situations where they need to stop play and I would imagine someone has a stopwatch or something and they can pause it when they need to stop recording in a situation like that.

I've seen at least one episode where they called LTAM, but stopped exactly one clue later. It wasn't a celebrity ego-stroking gabfest episode either.

I've also seen a couple where they run out of time but never do an LTAM at all.

There has been evidence that, if the last couple clues are stand-and-stares, they'll edit them out. However, I've seen episodes where no LTAM was given, and they ran out of time, but no such editing was done.

That's a tough situation. Since DD placement is random, no one really has a claim until it pops up. Even if a definite selection pattern has been established, we never know what clue a player will go to next. We might have to chalk that sort of thing up to fate. They'll readjust the scores in the event of a reversal, but they don't want to "replay" a significant chunk of the game. The most time consuming pause I witnessed during gameplay involved a monitor glitch. Alex read the clue, but the text did not appear on the board. The players were instructed to turn their backs to the board while the problem was fixed, and a new question was substituted. (SenseiCAY, was that your game?) In contrast, the "Sergeant Pepper" ruling was shown in real time.

Last edited by squarekara on Sat Jan 06, 2018 12:22 pm, edited 1 time in total.